She designs these incredible covers for Penguin Classics, and I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover but I think it's okay if you already love it and own it in a beat-to-shit library sale copy.

Ooh.

Someday when I am stupid-rich I will hire her to recover all my books like this. I can't wait to see what she does with the Richelle Meads.

Interstellar Pig by William Sleator

I read this book in third grade and it made a big impression; re-reading it today, I found it held up well. Interstellar Pig tells the story of a teenager on summer vacation who gets caught up in an intergalactic board game that proves to have dire consequences IT IS INTERESTING (don't even want to pause for a period in case I've already lost you) because the author spends the book playing around with subtle (and delicious) language mishaps on behalf of the alien characters. Also, the female alien is way hot, which even as a seven year old interested me strangely. If this is not enough, the imagery is tops: "A fat orange sun was sinking behind the island trees, and restless scribbles of gold danced over the dark water." But the best part is the way the teenager gets absorbed into the game while he plays it, not literally but mentally. We've all been there. (If it wasn't Doom, it was Super Mario 3 or D&D. Don't deny.)

I know the cover is queasy-making, but this is a good book to give to the kid in your life, or to your inner kid.

"Listen, would you like a speed-boat?"
"What's peed-boat?"
"A boat that will run in the water [...]."
"Will it float in my barf?"
"Yes, of course. [...]"
"Could I have it in my barf wiv' me?"
"Certainly, if Mummy says so."
"I'd like a boat in my barf."
"You shall have one, old man."

The OED tells me that "barf" did not come into use until 1966, and this book was written in 1933, so this was merely a fortuitous accident.

I am loving this book, for that and many other reasons. I will probably have it in my barf with me tonight.

If you like the Chronicles of Narnia, read this book. Miller, one of the co-founders of Salon.com, writes about Narnia with the love and exasperated tone that we all have, we who loved these books as children and worked out their subtext later on.

The first two-thirds of The Magician's Book are simply splendid. It gives you the pleasure of talking over all your favorite -- and least favorite -- passages from the book, with the added bonus of learning bits and pieces about C.S. Lewis' life which may have directly led to those passages. (A fascinating life, too: for the first long while, she makes him out to be a kindly, bright old bachelor, not unlike Mr. Tumnus, but after that she starts referencing all sorts of things outside this characterization: frequent bawdy, beery evenings; a writing group called the Inklings which included Tolkien; a touch of the English disease, and so on.)

The last third of the book disintegrates into a rather passionate defense of Lewis' work versus Tolkien's. (Tolkien did not approve of Narnia.) This is all very well, but I don't especially care about Tolkien's life or opinions, especially when Lewis was such an interesting figure on his own. And there was plenty of Narnia left unexplored: I want to know what in Lewis' life inspired Puzzle, Puddleglum, Shift, and so on.

However, she does a marvelous job of identifying just why I loved these books so much growing up. For one thing, the children in the books are nearly always treated as adults while in Narnia. The decisions they make are important, life-or-death choices, and when confronted with conflict, they are expected to behave every bit as morally and bravely as adults. This is part of why The Last Battle always felt like such a disappointment. At the very end, you see the Pevensie parents waving to their children far off in the distance. And of course, you recognize that this is necessary: Heaven isn't Heaven if you're separated from your family forever. But at the same time it means a final and definite end to any real adult adventures for the children. Peter cannot possibly be High King over his father.

The other thing The Last Battle robs us of is the limitless horizon of new stories. Miller talked to other authors and readers about their experiences with Narnia, and Neil Gaiman - who is quoted extensively, and has some rather wonderful things to say -- points out that Narnia is a landscape in which one senses all sorts of stories happening just out of sight. From the day when Lucy first arrives in Narnia and Mr. Tumnus spends hours telling her all about the exciting things that happened in Narnia's past, the reader senses a whole world of adventures waiting to be had. But once the characters all go to Heaven, there can be no more conflict, no more wrestling with good and evil, no more story. The new, vibrant, bigger version of Narnia is curiously flat.

Reading this book was very much like having a long, cozy chat with a fellow fan, and Miller's prose is clear, funny, moving and thoughtful. Check it out, but only if you're prepared to re-read the Chronicles afterward with newly appreciative eyes.

AUGH. I love Lord Peter Wimsey, but this plot was much too complicated, plus about half the book was written in Sayers' poor attempt at Scottish dialect, plus for some reason I could not keep any of the six suspects straight in my mind, plus it was BORING. Every time it started to pick up a little, she'd immediately throw four policemen in a room and make them have a ponderous discussion about train schedules. The real mystery is how this book ever got published.

"Aye," said Macpherson, excitedly, "but dinna ye see it explains naething at a'? It disna fit the description o'the man in the grey suit that tuk the bicycle tae Ayr. Nor it disna explain Betty's tale to Bunter, nor the muffled-up man escapin' fra Gowan's hoose at deid o'nicht, nor the rabbity-faced fellow in the train fra Castle-Douglas tae Euston. An' hoo aboot yon man that came knockin' on Campbell's door o'Monday midnicht?"

It's my own fault for finishing the damn thing, I suppose.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

I just finished my first Dorothy L. Sayers book, the first of her many mysteries starring an eccentric crime-solving aristocrat and his manservant-by-day, expert-photog-by-night valet. Imagine if Wooster and Jeeves went around solving mysteries, except Wooster was only pretending to be an ass, and there you have Lord Peter Wimsey and his butler, Bunter.

Quite apart from the quirky dialogue, puzzling plot and endearingly open-hearted discussions between Lord Peter and his policeman friend, this book is worth reading because the main character is a book hound. All through the novel he's sending his butler off to auctions to pick up rare editions for him, and Sayers thoughtfully includes footnotes for the reader which give details about the books requested, and whether Lord Peter was able to acquire them or not. As a book lover myself, I cannot express how satisfying I found this.

Pick this up if you've finished all the Miss Marple books and you're still hankering for a head-scratcher to eat up an afternoon.

Anyhow, I am happy with my smaller haul. My best find of the day: Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. Mystery lovers will know this as the first of her Lord Peter Wimsey books, but when I first saw it I thought it might be a hysterically inappropriate children's story.

I also found The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, a literary analysis of the Narnia books, The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide (for $1!), and an L.M. Montgomery book I've never seen before which doesn't even appear to be about a wistful orphan. Score!

I relate this here because I have not had such a gruesome, interesting death in a dream for some time, and I woke up feeling rather proud of it.

Also because there is nothing quite like being utterly certain that you are about to be devoured alive by rabid monkeys, only to open your eyes and discover that you get to go to the book sale instead.

I found this quotation in Happy Alchemy, a collection of essays about music and the theater by the great Robertson Davies. It was one of those occasional treasures: a book whose existence you never suspected, written by a favorite author, carelessly left on a $1 cart or a bargain table. It's those moments of great discovery that make the hours of browsing worthwhile, along with the lesser (but still keen) pleasures of discovering books you'd read as a child but lost track of, or books you've long wanted to read but had not yet found.

"There is a joy known only to collectors in possessing the physical form of a book, quite apart from its contents," wrote Davies. Also, "My collection is a mirror of my mind, or a large part of it, and sometimes I think what a sorry, frivolous mess it is."

Here's to collectors everywhere and our sorry, frivolous minds. See you tomorrow.

As you will recall from my inability to shut up about it in previous years, the sale takes place in the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason, a massive warehouse filled with over 300,000 books on sale for $5 or less -- usually, much less.

Last night, Michele and I found ourselves doing a little breakdown of the four days of SALE SALE SALE, and here it is for you:

Thursday
The sale opens at 10:00 a.m. with a long line out the door. As soon as the doors open, this line files right inside, so don't worry about it. Early birds get parking spaces (that lot fills up) and shopping carts (there's a limited supply). The people who show up first thing are about who you would expect. There are the book sharks -- bookstore owners who've come to mine the sale for treasures they can mark up and sell in their own stores -- and a lot of nutjob book lovers like me, the kind of people the sale rules get written for.

(Sale rules:
"Hoarding books is unfair to everybody. In fairness to all Book Sale participants:
-No blankets, sheets or any other coverings are allowed.
-You cannot have more than one hundred books or five boxes of books under your control at any given time without purchasing them.
-Anyone caught stashing or hiding books will be expelled.")

A tense atmosphere pervades the pavilion on Thursday, and people rarely make eye contact.

Evenings
Michele and I went on Friday night last year. Big change. You would expect it to be packed with people coming after work, but actually it was virtually empty, and there were no book sharks that I saw, just ordinary people come to browse. This is a very pleasant way to see the sale on your own terms, if you are sane enough not to go on Thursday morning. (I am not that sane.) I suspect Saturday-day will also be calm, but I don't know for sure.

Sunday
Sunday is crowded with the Sunday drivers of the book world, the book manatees. All the books get marked down to $1 or less, so you find a lot of parents coming for kids' books, little old ladies stocking up on mysteries and romances, students kicking around the classics, etc. The book sharks have already picked out the prime tuna and are nowhere to be found, so this crowd is gregarious and calm. It's a pleasure to come on Sunday and feel like part of a community: hearing a nine year old wish she could find that last Harry Potter, remembering you saw it in a box, and pulling it out for her, to her lasting delight. It's also a pleasure to take home two or three books for every dollar you spend.

I have to admit, though, part of me feels like the Kindle may be a Betamax. I suspect there's going to be a better device along shortly, and it's probably going to come from Apple.

Also, as I ponder purchasing an ebook device, I suddenly wonder how well that would work for me. Right now, most of my books cost under $3, because I get them at library sales and stuff. But how would that work with ebooks? Do you just wind up downloading them at torrent sites?

Basically, owning one of these devices would only be useful to me if I could convert most of my current library into ones and zeros. But that's almost a thousand books to find in electronic form -- is that possible? Would it cost a fortune (comparatively)? Do I maybe just want to go on turning up my nose at the Kindle and lugging a lot of books with me on vacation? How often do I go on vacation, anyway?

In short, do I, or do I not, want to be Neil Gaiman's library when I grow up?

I think I do. Go jump in a lake, Kindle.

Yes, ostensibly this book is about what happens when Death retires and goes to work on a farm, ostensibly it's about that. But then Pratchett, being Pratchett, sneaks in this whole other idea about what it means to be alive, which is actually one of the big questions humans are still trying to answer and well worth considering. For example, he posits the idea that cities have a life, of sorts.* And if cities are organisms -- big, slow-moving, slow-thinking organisms -- then are there smaller, quicker things that prey on them? Of course there are. Suburbs!

It's a great notion, you think, very creative, very funny. Then you start to think about how many people -- who are, after all, the life of cities -- leave for the suburbs once they start families or want more than $5 a month of disposable income, and you realize it's not actually so funny.

It's made me ponder some things. Like the way I tend to think of the Bay Area as one big city, so I might go to a San Francisco coffee shop in the morning, a Pleasant Hill park in the afternoon and an Oakland stadium at night and not feel I've really gone anywhere. But am I actually helping the suburban predators suck the life out of my city? Because, you know...that would be bad. It's something to consider.

And this is what Pratchett does, especially in his later novels. He takes a really interesting idea -- the essence of life; the definition of morality; what it means to be human -- and wraps it up in a bacon sandwich of absurdity and humor and fun. (The fun is the mayo on the bacon sandwich of absurdity.) And then people see the ridiculous covers and the multiple-exclamation-marks blurbs and they say "Oh, fantasy," and they wander off to find a true crime novel or something.

All of which is fine with me. I've collected 32 of these bacon sandwiches from used bookstores so far, and as long as people keep foolishly passing them up I will one day own them all.

*I am pretty sure that in all the debates about the nature of life, no one is seriously suggesting that cities are among the contenders, including Pratchett. But it's a neat metaphor, anyway.

Ohhhh.

This is what I want to grow up to be. Not even a person who owns this library; I actually want to grow up to be this library.

Gene's life would surely be better without a thousand books cluttering up the place, yet he cheerfully feeds my habit like this. What a fella, eh? I was gonna marry him before, but now I'm gonna marry him twice as hard.

I mean, assuming Neil won't have me.

This is not my library. YET.

Except...

Recently I came across a two-volume hardcover boxed set of the Alice books illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. And, and, and...ooh they are pretty! So pretty that I bought them (used for $20!) and am currently drooling over them. The colors are vivid without being garish, the expressions are whimsical without being ridiculous, and Alice herself, though almost too pretty, is saved by the addition of a pair of practical white tennis shoes. Okay, not period-appropriate, but definitely true to the Alice spirit.

Lately I've been realizing how much I value illustrations. I keep an "abridged for children" (horrible idea) version of Peter Pan around simply because I love Greg Hildebrandt's photo-realistic fairies. Neil Gaiman's lovely fairy tale Stardust is so much prettier with the languid Charles Vess illustrations. Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men becomes even funnier when every page is crawling with Stephen Player's vulgar, squashed-face Pictsies thumbing their noses at you from the corners. And what would Michael Chabon's The Final Solution be without the puzzling, word-bending drawings?

I'll be keeping this in mind at the book sale next month...